NEXTSTEP

From ArticleWorld

NEXTSTEP is the name of the object-oriented, multitasking operating system designed by NeXT Computer, Inc. for their own hardware architecture, the NeXT. NEXTSTEP was a revolutionary operating system in many ways.

NEXTSTEP was released in September 1989, after several years of development. It was a quite portable operating system, running on the Motorola 68K processors used by the NeXT hardware, but also on x86 processors, SPARC and HP PA-RISCs. An implementation of the API called OpenStep was later released, running on Solaris, Windows and NEXTSTEP itself. OpenStep later became the basis of MacOS X, as NeXT, Inc. was bought by Apple in 1997.

Features

NEXTSTEP was built around the Mach microkernel, including some source code from Berkeley's BSD Unix. Technically speaking, NEXTSTEP was not a Unix system, but it resembled Unix quite a lot.

The display system was based on PostScript. This allowed for exceptional graphical quality at its time, including palettes larger than 256 colors and resolution greater than 640x480, which seemed incredible at that moment. The trade-off was that this display system was a little slow and sometimes sloppy.

NEXTSTEP featured a very powerful and interesting API at its time. When NEXTSTEP came out, C was still the language of choice and C++ was an ongoing trend. The API featured by NEXTSTEP was based on Objective-C, an object-oriented C-like language, highly regarded for being much cleaner than C++. Objective-C gathered quite a great user base, especially through the kits (libraries) that were bundled in NEXTSTEP. The Portable Distributed Objects (allowing remote invocation) and Enterprise Objects Framework (an object-relational database system) made NEXTSTEP a platform of choice for financial programming.

However, the thing that got NEXTSTEP a place in the history was its user interface. NEXTSTEP featured a consistent, carefully designed and ergonomic desktop and look. It also promoted the Dock, which is still used in Mac OS X, and the Shelf, which is often used through an add-on. Many GUI-related concepts found their way into mainstream operating systems through NEXTSTEP: the 3D widgets, drag-and-drop for other objects than files, inspectors, window-based modification notices, real-time scrolling of windows and internationalization. It also featured excellent multimedia capabilities, through the Motorola 56000 DSP. All these are features which lasted past the rather short and anonymous life of the NEXTSTEP, mainly to the large cost of the hardware on which it ran.

WorldWideWeb

WorldWideWeb is the name of the first www browser. It was developed by Tim Berners-Lee, and it ran on NEXTSTEP, as well as the first web server in fact.